Connecting artists, naturalists, and educators

Lessons For A Young Botanist

This article was published in the December 2006 issue of Artists’ Botany.

One of the true treasures in our collection is an introductory botany book that was published in 1835. This book is not a college text, but instead an introductory botany book for children. The botany lessons in this book are presented as a conversation between a mother and a young child. These conversations are modeled after actual conversations the author had with a nine-year old family friend.

This book is titled, The Little Botanist or Steps to the Attainment of Botanical Knowledge. The title alone makes us giddy. The fourteen illustrations included in this book were drawn and engraved by J.D. Sowerby and were based on sketches created by the author, Caroline A. Halsted.

The conversations between mother and child are so sweet and so engaging, it is not possible to describe them well enough in this little space. Throughout the book, the young girl’s mother patiently and lovingly discusses the following
topics with her daughter: the definition of botany, flower structure, artificial and natural classification systems, Greek and Latin terms, and the morphological features of several types of plants. During a conversation about flower parts, the young mother teaches her daughter how to remember the arrangement of parts in a flower. She asks her daughter to stretch out her hand and to lift her fingers so as to form a cup. She then explains:

…call the thumb the calyx, the first finger the corolla, the second the stamens, the third the pistil, the fourth the pericarp, and the entire of the hand the receptacle…..for the calyx, like the thumb, stands apart from the next four parts of a flower, which, like the fingers, are more immediately connected with each other; and they all spring from the receptacle, which is the bottom part of a flower, and on which, generally speaking, all the other parts rest.

The conversations recorded in this book are precious. The botany lessons in this 171-year old book are as well because they offer a glimpse into how botanists made meaning so many years ago.

Updated 9/26/09
This book can be viewed online and is available as a PDF at Google Book Search.

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